Category: The Dish

"Operationally, British forces have performed poorly in Basra. Maybe it’s best that they leave. Now we will have a clear field in southern Iraq," – a "senior White House foreign policy official" (Hadley?) to the Daily Telegraph.

From the moment before the war when Rumsfeld said he didn’t need the Brits to the comment yesterday that the Brits are no good anyway: this is one reason why the Atlantic alliance is in such disrepair. The lesson is clear: if you want to be an ally of the United States, be prepared to be dumped on by this White House.
 

In the immortal voice of Peter Sellers:

An enjoyably time-wasting diversion:

In theory, the planet has 24 time zones. Actually, there are about 39, and they are still hotly debated. Within the past month, President Hugo Chavez has talked of moving Venezuela’s clocks forward half an hour, and Indian scientists have urged their government to do the same.

India is currently the most significant part of the world with a half-hourly time zone – five hours behind Greenwich. This has a curious advantage for British journalists there worrying about deadlines, because you can get GMT by the simple trick of turning your watch upside down (trust me, it works). Nepal and the Chatham Islands actually have quarter-hour zones, which is really confusing.

… The Chinese force the entire country, even the far west, to observe Beijing time.

Carbon-belching cars are environmentally damaging enough, but have you ever thought how much space is taken up by parking? Ahem:

Early indications point to a lot of asphalt out there. If a single parking space averages 9-feet by 19-feet, then Tippecanoe County’s 355,000 spaces translates into two square miles of pavement, the equivalent of about 1,000 football fields. If Tippecanoe is typical, that would mean the US has paved over roughly 6,000 square miles – an area larger than the state of Connecticut – to accommodate cars or trucks.

Sam Harris gave an address to the recent atheism conference that, as is his wont, challenged his audience. Money quote:

Attaching a label to something carries real liabilities, especially if the thing you are naming isn’t really a thing at all. And atheism, I would argue, is not a thing. It is not a philosophy, just as "non-racism" is not one. Atheism is not a worldview—and yet most people imagine it to be one and attack it as such. We who do not believe in God are collaborating in this misunderstanding by consenting to be named and by even naming ourselves.

Another problem is that in accepting a label, particularly the label of "atheist," it seems to me that we are consenting to be viewed as a cranky sub-culture. We are consenting to be viewed as a marginal interest group that meets in hotel ballrooms. I’m not saying that meetings like this aren’t important. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t think it was important. But I am saying that as a matter of philosophy we are guilty of confusion, and as a matter of strategy, we have walked into a trap. It is a trap that has been, in many cases, deliberately set for us. And we have jumped into it with both feet.

While it is an honor to find myself continually assailed with Dan [Dennett], Richard [Dawkins], and Christopher [Hitchens] as though we were a single person with four heads, this whole notion of the "new atheists" or "militant atheists" has been used to keep our criticism of religion at arm’s length, and has allowed people to dismiss our arguments without meeting the burden of actually answering them. And while our books have gotten a fair amount of notice, I think this whole conversation about the conflict between faith and reason, and religion and science, has been, and will continue to be, successfully marginalized under the banner of atheism.

So, let me make my somewhat seditious proposal explicit: We should not call ourselves "atheists." We should not call ourselves "secularists." We should not call ourselves "humanists," or "secular humanists," or "naturalists," or "skeptics," or "anti-theists," or "rationalists," or "freethinkers," or "brights." We should not call ourselves anything. We should go under the radar—for the rest of our lives. And while there, we should be decent, responsible people who destroy bad ideas wherever we find them.

It’s an argument for intellectual honesty over labels. To that extent, at least, he’s surely right. That means also, I think, distinguishing between those non-believers who treat religion with forceful clarity and criticism and those who treat religion with unvarnished, unlettered contempt.

Or "9,814 times E". Ben Vershbow explains here.

Why would conservatives and liberals reach completely predictable ideological conclusions about simple factual testimony – like the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas sexual harassment dispute? Ilya Somin suggests an answer. It’s

a consequence of the all-too-common assumption that our ideological adversaries are not only wrong but also evil – or at least far more likely to be so than those who agree with us. If you believe that liberals are, on average, likely to be morally corrupt, then it would be rational for you to assume that a liberal is more likely to be lying than a conservative and thus to automatically believe Thomas over Hill even in the absence of clear proof. And vice versa if you hold the reverse view.

But Hill, at the time, was a conservative appointee! These nuances are lost in the culture wars, of course. Or, rather, they have to be denied. And so the partisan right subsequently insisted that Hill was actually a closet-liberal (and mediocre at her job to boot), as well as a liar. Thomas – about as mediocre a justice as one could imagine – was nonetheless touted by Bush I as the best candidate for the job regardless of race. Yes, many conservatives claimed that with a straight face – and still do!

I remember the hearings vividly. I was much more comfortable within the conservative world back then. I still thought it was obvious that Hill was telling the truth. In sexual harassment suits, I tend to believe the women. And I couldn’t see Hill’s motive for putting herself through all that for no reason. I also believed Paula Jones, of course, and most of the other victims of Bill Clinton’s petty, ugly abuses of power. But the Clinton sexual harassment wars merely confirm Somin’s argument, don’t they? All the conservatives believed the women in Clinton’s case. And almost all the liberals – and the feminists – trashed the abused women. In the cycle America has been in since the sixties, the truth is barely relevant.

Kottke’s Alex Wright uncovers a classic piece of prophesy from as early as 1932:

Here, the workspace is no longer cluttered with any books. In their place, a screen and a telephone within reach. Over there, in an immense edifice, are all the books and information. From there, the page to be read, in order to know the answer to the question asked by telephone, is made to appear on the screen. The screen could be divided in half, by four, or even ten if multiple texts and documents had to be consulted simultaneously. There would be a loudspeaker if the image had to be complemented by oral data and this improvement could continue to the automating the call for onscreen data. Cinema, phonographs, radio, television: these instruments, taken as substitutes for the book, will in fact become the new book, the most powerful works for the diffusion of human thought. This will be the radiated library and the televised book.

Wright notes:

Sweet fancy Macintosh, if that’s not what we’re all doing right here on the web all day.

John Aravosis begins to understand what interest group politics are actually about:

What I’m hearing is a message far different from what you hear from NGLTF and some of the louder activist claiming to speak for the enlightened masses. I think that a lot of gay people never truly accepted the transgender revolution that was thrust upon them. They simply sat back and shut up about their questions and concerns and doubts out of a sense of shame that it was somehow impolite to even question what was happening, and fear that if they did ask questions they’d be marked as bigots. And now, that paper-thin transgender revolution is coming home to roost.

There’s a connection:

More than one million Iraqi refugees have fled to Syria, putting an extraordinary burden on a poor country of 20 million people. 2,000 refugees from Iraq arrive at the Syrian border everyday, and Iraqi refugees residing in Syria comprise roughly 8% of that country’s population, a huge drain on the local economy…

The refugee crisis is also likely to lead to more terrorism and Islamic extremism. "Past experience has shown that large concentrations of refugees incubate irredentist violence and nourish jihadism. Coping with these flows will require the coordinated efforts of the UN, wealthy donor countries, and nongovernmental organizations…The presence of large numbers of Iraqi refugees in Jordan provides useful cover for jihadis looking to operate in that country. Moreover, the so called ratlines that bring foreign fighters into Iraq can support the reverse flow of terrorists to other regional cities or onward to western Europe." [Council on Foreign Relations, 9/07]